February 28, 2014

Like everyone else, I have an opinion about what happened in Arizona the other day. My opinion is no better than anyone else’s. Rather than explicitly tell you what I think, let me let others, who are much more eloquent, speak for me.

First, I appreciate this quote by Rich Lowery. It sums up the issue perfectly. The italics are mine.

The question isn’t whether businesses run by people opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds should provide their services for gay weddings; it is whether they should be compelled to by government. The critics of the much-maligned Arizona bill pride themselves on their live-and-let-live open-mindedness, but they are highly moralistic in their support of gay marriage, judgmental of those who oppose it and tolerant of only one point of view on the issue — their own.
—Rich Lowery, “Brewer’s Foolish Veto“

Second, as usual, Doug Wilson is brilliant in analyzing what is happening in our country. I encourage you to read this entire article (several times). Here is a quote (once again the italics are mine):

In the pre-civil rights era, segregation was imposed and enforced by the government making laws that prohibited private citizens from undertaking any free market integration on their own. When that folly came crashing down, as it should have, some thought it would be a good corrective to prohibit a private citizen running a public business from making such sinful choices on his own. But this was just the coercive hand of the state from the other direction, a heavy hand that is now being used on evangelical photographers and bakers.

Laws should be used to combat crime, not sin, and certainly not faux-sin. What the legislation in the civil rights era ought to have done was strike down every form of the government’s own discrimination against blacks, and its mandating of discrimination elsewhere, and left it there. If Bubba still wanted to exclude blacks from his ribs joint, then that was Bubba’s problem, and Bubba’s loss. Everybody’s money is the same color.